In a Yellow Wood
by Zubeneschamali
Summary: Missing scene from late Season Four. Megan tells Don about her future plans. Spoilers for "When Worlds Collide."


Title: In a Yellow Wood  
Author: Zubeneschamali  
Rating: K  
Summary: Missing scene from late Season Four. Megan tells Don about her future plans. Spoilers for "When Worlds Collide."

Disclaimer: They aren't mine, or they wouldn't have been left in the condition they were after "When Worlds Collide." Hmph.

A/N: Thanks to Kiki for beta reading. The story title was taken from…well, you'll see.

oooooooooooooooo

"Hey Don, you got a minute?"

He looked up from the form he was filling out for the third time that day. Sometimes those jokes about paperwork coming in triplicate weren't all that funny. "Yeah, Megan, what's up?"

She came a few steps closer, pausing at the cubicle entrance. "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

Her tone was light-hearted, but ever-so-slightly forced. And suddenly the conversation that he'd been expecting to have for months was upon him, and he wasn't at all prepared. "Yeah, sure," he replied, matching her casual tone but also matching the serious look in her eyes.

She'd been back for a couple of days from her week of being incommunicado, without a word as to where she'd been or why. He hadn't pushed it; she had taken the time off, after all, and if this was some kind of attempt to clear her head or think about her future, he hadn't wanted to influence her one way or the other. Now, just the fact that she wanted to talk to him outside the office was giving him a bad feeling about what was coming next.

They exchanged a few words on the way in the elevator and down the street to the only non-Starbucks left in their corner of downtown: words on the weather, the Lakers' chances in the playoffs, the chances that last week's minor tremor was a prelude to The Big One. They didn't talk about anything to do with work, or anyone in the office. He figured that would come soon enough.

They reached the counter after waiting behind a few other people taking an afternoon coffee break from the neighboring high rises, their fashionable clothing marking them as being from the legal offices and not the federal building. Don ordered his usual plain coffee and Megan's extra-hot-skim-milk-extra-whip raspberry mocha, noticing her smile at how he didn't even need to ask. It was funny, the kind of details you didn't consciously set out to learn about someone, but nevertheless would never forget about them.

Megan moved to pull her wallet out of her handbag, and Don waved her off. "This one's on me," he said.

"I thought it was my turn," she offered in protest.

"You can get the next one," he replied, looking her in the eye. _Wherever that might be_, he added in his head.

The half-smile, half-grimace she gave him made it seem like she had heard the words anyway.

The clerk set their cups on the scarred wooden counter, and Don tossed down a five-dollar bill. "Keep it," he said, then directed Megan towards a quiet table in the corner. He paused to pour half-and-half in his coffee and followed it up with a healthy dose of sugar, stirring carefully to make sure it was blended in. No, he wasn't stalling. Not at all.

A colored pencil drawing hung above the rickety wooden table in the corner, showing an autumn forest landscape that was obviously not L.A. Megan was looking at it as Don dropped into the metal chair across the table. Then she took the lid off her coffee and. stared down at the drink for a moment before scooping up a bit of whipped cream with a spoon. "So, you look like you know what this is about," she started.

He took a swig of his coffee, managing not to wince as the hotter-than-expected brew burned down his throat. "Why don't you tell me," he said.

"Okay." She started to lean back, then shifted in her chair and leaned forward on her elbows, still toying with the spoon. "I suppose it's no secret that I haven't had my head completely in my work for a while."

He thought about making a crack about Larry and the space station, but decided it wasn't the time. "Since your assignment in DC last year, right?" She'd come back with a shadow in her eyes that had only deepened when everything hit the fan with Colby, and even after his return to the team, that shadow hadn't entirely gone away. It was the reason he wasn't surprised to be having this conversation.

She took in another bit of whipped cream before snapping the lid back on the cup. "Actually, ever since Crystal Hoyle," she admitted, raising her eyes to his.

That took him aback. He'd been the one forced to go to counseling over that debacle, not her. Sure, she'd talked to someone for a few months about her hostage experience, but he hadn't seen it affecting her performance. "Megan, if you hadn't had your head in the game for the past, what, eighteen months, believe me, I would have said something."

She gave a half smile. "I know that, Don. It's not that I haven't been paying attention to my work…it's more that my heart hasn't been in it. And no, the DOJ assignment didn't help, but it's not the root cause."

He took another drink of coffee, regarding her across the table. "Then what is it?"

There was a pause. Megan took a sip of her mocha and set the cup down. "When I was…with Crystal, I was trying to get her to open up, you know, following the textbook approach." She gave a quick roll of her eyes and went on, "She saw right through it, but she still said a few things that got me thinking. I'd looked through her file, and I examined it a lot more thoroughly afterwards. You know, we actually had an awful lot in common."

"Yeah, except one of you ended up as an FBI agent, and the other one…" _Ended up getting shot by one_, he didn't have to say out loud.

"See, that's the thing." Looking slightly more animated, Megan went on, "We got into the same kind of trouble when we were teenagers, but I got out of it and she didn't. And for the longest time, I kept thinking about something I could have done, something I could have said, that might have made a difference."

Don knew what she was talking about. He'd been there himself, if not with regards to Crystal Hoyle, then with other cases that had gone south faster than he would have liked, leaving him wondering if the right word at the right time might have changed the perp's mind and kept a crime from being committed, kept an innocent person alive, kept a decent person out of jail. "Megan, you can't mean you've been beating yourself up about this all this time."

"Not exactly." She took a long draught and toyed with the cup, rolling its edge in slow circles on the table. "I figured out that there was nothing I could have done for Crystal. It took a while, but I got it. And then I realized that there are other people out there like her, like me, that I _can_ do something for."

He figured he might as well be the one to lay it on the table. "And you don't think you can do that within the FBI."

Her gaze was apologetic and rueful at the same time. "I used to," she said softly. "I really did. But then there was the DOJ assignment, and…." She shook her head. "I know you know some of what went on there, but there's a lot that you don't." She added under her breath, "And it ended up being more than I could handle."

"And then to come back to Colby like that…."

The corner of her mouth turned up again. "He told me to hang in there," she said, pausing for another sip. "He had a pretty good guess about what I'd been up to, and he said the FBI needed people like me to stick it out." She looked up and met his eyes. "And I've tried. I really have. But I'm spending more time wondering what I'm doing here than feeling like I'm doing something worthwhile."

Don shook his head and leaned forward, reaching out to put a hand on her forearm. "Megan, what you do is definitely worthwhile."

"But it's not the most I could be doing, the biggest contribution I could make." She paused. "Look, as important as the work we do is, sometimes it feels like it's just cleaning up, you know? It's catching someone who's already done something, or sometimes it's actually preventing something before it happens. But either way, it's working with people who have already done something stupid, or at least have already committed themselves to an action. There's no changing their minds, there's only stopping them."

"Not so sure the hostage negotiation guys would agree with you, but yeah, I can see that." He'd certainly felt the same way himself on more than one occasion.

She slid her arm along the table so his hand was resting on hers, gave it a squeeze, and let go. "So last week back East I met with an old college friend who runs a counseling program for women who are in prison. They're trying to get back to the model of prison as rehabilitation rather than punishment, and I'm going to join them."

Don sat back in his chair. "Doesn't sound any different from what you were just criticizing this place for." He'd tried to modulate his tone, but he still heard a slightly accusing note, and it made him inwardly wince.

She tilted her head to the side and then back. "Maybe, but these are people who are going to get out, who are going to be on the outside and with the potential to completely turn their lives around. Now, I might never have been in prison, but I was in some pretty bad trouble when I was sixteen. I had people who were willing to help straighten me out, but without that…." She shrugged. "It's time I did that for someone else."

Don was quiet for a moment, mulling over what she'd said. "I don't suppose there's any way I can talk you out of it."

"Anything you might think of, I've already thought of it." The look in her eyes was determined. "I've spent an awful lot of my life trying to be what someone else wanted me to be. I need to do this for _me_."

He let out a long sigh. "Sounds like you've been thinking about this for a while."

"Only seriously for the last couple of months." Her gaze dropped to the drink in her hand, and she took a quick swallow. "I've had other reasons not to want to leave L.A."

_Oh, man_, he thought. Reluctantly, he asked, "And what does Larry think of this?"

"He's completely supportive," she said quickly. "He actually suggested that I think about getting my doctorate."

"Yeah? Two doctors in one relationship, huh?"

"Seems to work for Charlie and Amita," she replied. "Besides, the first thing he said was that the East Coast is only a fraction of the distance from here to the International Space Station, and the journey is much better served by commercial transport."

Don smiled in response. "Yeah, that sounds like Larry."

"And he hasn't said a word that could be construed as trying to talk me out of it," she replied.

He looked at her more sharply. "No matter how much you want him to?"

Megan stared at him for a moment, then said, "Well, shoot, you won't need to find another behavioral specialist if you keep coming up with insights like that."

"Aw, there's no one who could replace you, anyway," he replied, the words as heartfelt as they could be.

Her smile that time was slightly watery. "Let's not go getting all mushy here, okay?"

"Fair enough." He gulped down the last of the coffee and said, "So, what's your timeline?"

"The standard two weeks." His dismay must have been reflected on his face, for she hurried on. "I'm sorry to do that to you, but Marcia needs me in Baltimore, and I'd rather have a clean break, anyway."

"Well, I guess we'll manage." He frowned for a moment, thinking of their case load. The paperwork he'd been working on was the last of the Center Mass Records stuff, and there wasn't anything major in the hopper. Unless something came up at the last minute, as it so often did.

"I don't want to tell David or Colby yet." He gave her a surprised look, and she went on, "You know how weird it is when you're on your way out, and it's like marking time? I want to avoid that as long as I can."

"I hear you," he said, thinking of his awkward last weeks in Albuquerque, heightened by the personal awkwardness between him and Kim. "It's up to you to let them know; just don't spring it on them, okay?"

"I doubt it'll be much of a surprise," she said quietly. "I mean, you weren't surprised, were you?"

Don rubbed a hand over his face. "You know how have this little part of you that's always kind of planning for the worst?" When she nodded, he went on, "Sometimes, that part's not so little."

She gave a quick smile. "Yeah, I know what you mean."

Silence fell. He looked up at the colored pencil drawing and noticed for the first time that a few lines of poetry were written below the scene of a forest path lined with yellow birches. "'The Road Less Taken'," he read. "If you've read one poem by Robert Frost, that's the one, right?"

"I think every kid who goes to school in the U.S. must write a paper on that poem at some point."

A memory flashed through his head, and the corners of his mouth quirked up. Looking over at Megan, who had a curious expression on her face, he said, "Almost every kid." She gestured for him to go on, and he said, "Sophomore year in high school, Charlie and I had this deal going. We each had our own…specialties, you know, and so we'd sometimes trade assignments."

"You'd do each other's homework?" Megan asked, her eyes gleaming. "Don and Charlie Eppes, cheaters?"

"Aw, you know, the sooner we both got done with our English essays and our math homework, the sooner we could get to more fun stuff."

"Which for Charlie probably meant more math," Megan replied with a grin.

He rolled his eyes. "Right. So anyway, we had the same English teacher, but in different classes, so when we had the same assignment to write about one of Frost's poems, I just reworded my essay a little and gave it to Charlie in exchange for a few algebra problems." He tapped his empty coffee cup on the table. "Didn't take her long to figure it out."

"Ooh, busted," Megan teased, and he realized how rare it was that he saw her smile anymore.

"Pretty much, yeah." He went on to tell the story of how their mother had taken to watching over them as they did their homework -- separately -- for the next few months, and by the time the next school year started, they were ingrained enough in the habit that there was no further "division of labor" between them.

"So how is it working with him again, after all these years?" Megan asked in a deliberately casual tone as she drained the last of her mocha.

_Yep, she's profiling again_, Don thought. Aloud he said, "It's great. You know, we've had a few rough patches, but it's gotten so I don't know what I'd do without him." He thought for a moment about the teasing he'd had to endure from his classmates when they found out his twelve-year-old brother had been doing his homework. Then he thought about how proud he was now when someone from another agency saw Charlie in action for the first time and came around to believing in the power of his math, how well their approaches complemented each other, and how much a part of the team his little brother had become. "It's great," he repeated.

They exited the coffeeshop in a somewhat lighter mood than they'd entered it. Across the street from the FBI building, they were waiting for the light to change when something occurred to Don, something that he hadn't said. He turned to his partner and said with a hand on her arm, "Megan, I think you're doing a good thing. I mean, I don't know what we're going to do without you, but I think what you're doing is good."

She smiled, one of those full-blown smiles that he knew he hadn't seen in months, but her expression was tinged with relief. And he suddenly realized that she hadn't wanted merely to tell her supervisor and partner that she was leaving. She'd wanted to know she had his approval, and she hadn't been sure she was going to get it.

"Thanks," was all she said aloud, her eyes speaking volumes more.

The light changed, and they crossed the street. Don searched his memory for the last lines of that poem. _What were they again? _"Two roads diverged in a wood," he said, half under his breath, seeking out the remaining words.

Next to him, Megan filled in the blank. "And I, I took the one less traveled by."

He gave her a smile and slung his arm over her shoulders as they walked into the FBI building, reciting the last line. "And that has made all the difference."


End file.
